Andy Markovits & Heiko Beyer on "The long-standing interaction between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism"

My good friend Andy Markovits
has written an important, engaging, and eye-opening book on the complex
and tricky subject of European anti-Americanism. The main focus is on
its current forms and transformations, but he also puts these in a
larger historical perspective. [....] The book is valuable and
illuminating as well as absorbing (and highly readable), and I recommend
it to everyone.

Markovits's arguments are also likely to be controversial–but many of
the reasons only help to explain why this is a book that needed to be
written. [....]

=> One of subjects explored in Uncouth Nation
is the frequent tendency for various types of anti-Americanism, ranging
from "right" to "left" and along various cultural and ideological
tangents, to be linked to various types of anti-semitism. (Over the
past half-century, that has often involved links to both anti-Zionism
and anti-semitism, two phenomena that I would describe as not precisely identical but obviously overlapping and interwoven.)

Unfortunately, that subject remains timely and important. It is further
explored and updated in an excellent piece that Andy Markovits and
Heiko Beyer just published in Tablet Magazine. Their
analysis is sufficiently wide-ranging, substantial, and illuminating
that I won't try to summarize it. But here is their concluding paragraph::

The myth that Jews, helped by their American masters or servants, rule
the world never disappeared. It merely lay dormant for a few decades in
the aftermath of the Holocaust, thus deviating from the norm of having
anti-Semitism be an integral and accepted part of public discourse.
Alas, there are many signs that the threshold of shame concerning
anti-Semitism has been substantially lowered. And its consistent link to
anti-Americanism makes this lowering so much easier and more socially
acceptable. Anti-Semitism’s association with America and thus to
ultimate power, makes invoking it an antinomian act of speaking truth to
power, which, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, is
inherently a good thing.

(For one classic non-European example of that last point, which helps illustrate the ways in which anti-semitic conspiracy theories originally developed in Europe have gone world-wide, see here.)

Graffito like the one appearing one morning just across the street from
the apartment in a left-leaning so-called alternative neighborhood in
Leipzig, “Fick Israel—Fick die U.S.A” is certainly no surprise for those
who consider themselves part of the left. Anti-Zionism has been an
endemic marker for the global left since 1967 as has its ideological
companion, anti-Americanism. Both sentiments have become core
characteristics of what it means to be left in liberal advanced
capitalist democracies.

Unlike other prejudices, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are
considered not only acceptable but in fact de rigueur for large parts of
the global left because both denounce the rich and mighty, with Israel
represented as the main satellite of U.S. imperialism. Both of these
beliefs are positioned as speaking truth to power. In her important book
Das unsichtbare Vorurteil (The Invisible Prejudice) which deals
with anti-Semitism among the U.S. left after Sept. 11, Sina Arnold
demonstrates that this is not just a narrative popular in Europe but
also widespread among American progressives—which is not surprising
since the latter almost by definition are highly critical of U.S.
foreign policy.

Lest there be any misunderstandings: Being anti-Trump is not being
anti-American! When we use the term anti-Americanism we mean an
all-encompassing resentment not a mere opposition to a specific
administration or policy. Opposing Trump’s very being, resisting his
policies every step of the way is not anti-American. Indeed, it often in
fact is based on the same American values that anti-Americanism
denounces: plurality, minority rights, and public liberty.

Opposing American policies does not constitute anti-Americanism.
Disliking what America does is not anti-American. But having an
all-encompassing antipathy for what America is, does in fact represent
anti-Americanism.

Anti-Americanism refers to a deeper presence of negative attitudes
against all things American, a point of view, a state of mind that
though occasionally dormant has never been moribund in European opinion
of America and Americans since its first manifestations among 18th
century naturalists. Paul Hollander’s definition of anti-Americanism
appears quite useful to clarify our approach: “Anti-Americanism is a predisposition to hostility
[emphasis in the original] toward the United States and American
society, a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic,
and political institutions, traditions, and values; it entails an
aversion to American culture in particular and its influence abroad,
often also contempt for the American national character … and dislike of
American people, manners, behavior, dress …; a firm belief in the
malignity of American influence and presence anywhere in the world.”

Take the German word Amerikanisierung for example, which was
introduced into the German dictionary during the heydays of the
intelligentsia’s culturally pessimistic anti-Americanism at the turn
from the 19th to the 20th century, as was its French counterpart américanisation.
Until today, whenever used, in the most varied of contexts (sports,
language, education, criminality, culture, etc.) terms like Amerikanisierung and américanisation invariably imply a phenomenon’s cheapening and loss of authenticity as in the Amerikanisierung of soccer, of food, of music, of language, of whatever. Américanisation
also entails a corrosive dimension, something that ruins an item’s and
context’s original bliss and genuineness. In addition, there is a sense
of inevitability to this process, a kind of helplessness befalling the
victims of Americanization, a loss of agency in the face of this
all-powerful onslaught that breeds resentment. This same mindset
pertains to anti-Semitism as well. Jews, just like Americans, are also
seen as corrosive, as undermining an entity’s authenticity, as
subverting its original purity. Both Jews and Americans are deemed to be
particularly powerful even though they are almost always considered
culturally inferior and somehow artificial, most assuredly inauthentic.

The attribution of an almost-limitless power to the United States
constitutes one of the key links between anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism. Israel is perceived as an American outpost, the sole
Goliath in the Middle East (somehow other regional powers like Iran and
Saudi Arabia have never been subjected to anywhere near the opprobrium
that Israel has received in the past 50 years), against whom the
Palestinian David is desperately and honorably taking a stand. At the
same time, the notion of unlimited power attributed to the United States
reveals another dimension: the affinity of anti-American conspiracy
theories with anti-Semitic narratives.

***

Although it is hard to tell whether today’s anti-Americanism in some
parts of the world derives from anti-Semitic beliefs or the other way
around, it is obvious that the tale of Jewish power and conspiracy has
been around both before the United States attained its global power that
it has wielded since the end of World War II, and before Israel was
founded. Well before Wilhelm Marr’s coinage of the term anti-Semitism in
1879, the view of the almighty, evil, devious Jew whose ways, indeed
whose very being, comprises the essence of corrosion, had been alive and
well in European discourse for centuries. Jews have long been viewed as
corrosive agents that stealthily but all the more successfully dissolve
the authentic fabric of a traditional collective, most eminently that
of a nation since the 19th century, or in its much more primordial and
ethnocentric manifestation the Volk.

European intellectuals of the right and the left have accorded America a
similarly corrosive power that, not by chance, they see as strongly
related to that of the Jews, as depicted in conspiracy theories like the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Egypt, for example, the 41
episodes of the show “Horseman Without a Horse” in which the hero
discovers a secret document written in Russian and describing a Jewish
world conspiracy, were shown during Ramadan in 2002 by various
television stations. Right-wing extremists in Russia, Europe, and
America have reprinted the Protocols repeatedly, and the boom of
esoteric and populist conspiracy theories has been accompanied by many
articles and books featuring variations on the Protocols’ leitmotif.

Neo-Nazi views still represent perhaps the most overt manifestations of
anti-Semitism as well as its relationship with anti-Americanism. In a
recent article the University of Cambridge historian Brendan Simms
showed that Hitler’s anti-Americanism was sharpened by his experience of
American troops being the decisive force in defeating Wilhelmine
Germany in WWI. Simms argues that this deep-seated anti-American
resentment propelled Hitler to become the lethal anti-Semite that he
turned out to be. It was therefore Hitler’s anti-Americanism that led to
his anti-Semitism, rather than his days in fin de siècle Vienna in
which he first encountered real live Jews and where he also failed to
gain entrance to that city’s arts academy.

While we are swayed by Simms’ impressive evidence and novel
interpretation, we still believe that it remains unclear, even in
Hitler’s case, whether anti-Americanism constitutes the source for
anti-Semitism or whether it is vice versa. In fact both narratives—“the
Jews use America to rule the world,” and “America uses the Jews and
Israel” to do the same—have been manifest for a long time, and
complement each other. Symptomatic on the extreme right is the Nazi
ideologist Giselher Wirsing’s 1941 elaboration in Der maßlose Kontinent
(The Excessive Continent) that “The lodges [were] the collecting tank
of Jewish power within the U.S. gradually growing beneath the surface.”

The belief that it is the other way around, and that the United States
uses Israel to secure and expand its global domination, is a core
element of the Marxist-Leninist catechism as Thomas Haury in his 2002
book Antisemitismus von links (Anti-Semitism From Left) argues
so convincingly. However, often this anti-American anti-Zionism
backfires when leftist groups find themselves in uncomfortably full
agreement with the far right in arguing that Jews have “too much power”
in the United States. Then again, it is particularly on issues of
America and Jews/Israel in which the antipathies of the far left and far
right often meet each other in happy harmony.

Yet the alignment of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, in its varied
manifestations, is much older than Nazism or theories of imperialism. It
can be found as early as the second half of the 19th century when
anti-Semitism became a social movement in Europe. Just think of the
Dreyfus Affair in France or the rise of political anti-Semitism in Karl
Lueger’s Vienna: It was during that time when Jewishness and Americanism
became synonyms of modernity and liberalism which, as many feared,
would destroy Europe’s authenticity.

Jews and America back then were already identified with essential
economic, political, and cultural institutions and ingredients that
constituted the essence of capitalist modernity. Money, commerce, banks,
stock markets, and materialism came to be associated with an almighty
Jewish and/or American influence. The complexity of modernity is here
reduced through a personification of capitalism and facile conspiracy
theories. In a way both resentments fulfill a shared function: to
rationalize an increasingly complex world by denouncing a small group of
people working behind the scenes to design the world at their will.
Until today the combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism offers
a much-needed and seemingly robust explanation of such abstract,
complex and scary phenomena as modernization, urbanization,
globalization, or (neo)liberalism first by declaring Washington, Wall
Street, and Hollywood as the control centers of the world only to add
that the Jews call the shots in these places often using the code word
East Coast (oddly never West Coast) in this context.

Rather than dealing with capitalism as a profoundly international—indeed
a-national—construct which it so clearly is, it is commonplace for many
on the German left (not least important voices in the Social Democratic
Party and the country’s most powerful trade union, IG Metall) to
mitigate capitalism’s ills by assigning its particularly rapacious
characteristics solely to an Anglo-American (sotto voce Jewish)
casino version that operates in stark contrast to the more humane and
local German one often labelled Rhenish capitalism.

Jesper Gulddal has collected many expressions of anti-Americanism in
19th-century European literature in which a diversity of authors from
France, Britain, and Germany (Gulddal’s countries of analysis) argued
emphatically that America’s lack of tradition and culture, as well as
its materialism, vulgarity, religious bigotry, and political immaturity
constituted not only the essence of this country’s very being but that
they would also somehow infest Europe. Gulddal’s work confirms the
finding that conceptually speaking, there exists no country-specific
anti-Americanism but that this phenomenon’s characteristics exist in
identical forms in all European countries. To be sure, Tory
anti-Americanism in Britain of the 1930s and 1940s was clearly a lot
less pronounced and acute than that of the Nazis in Germany at the same
time; but the constituent characteristics of the beliefs in both places
were virtually identical. Indeed, even a cursory reading of Philippe
Roger’s superb book The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism
demonstrates how all the tropes identifying anti-Americanism in
Germany play an equally crucial role in its French variant. Parallel
scholarship on anti-Americanism in Spain such as Alessandro Seregni’s
excellent El antiamericanismo español confirms this continent-wide pattern.

Though not part of Gulddal’s work, the same shared intercountry
characteristics pertain also to anti-Semitism where the acuity of its
manifestation varies by geographic location and era but where its
essential characteristics are identical over time and place. The
negative traits associated with Americans that Gulddal’s study brings to
light have similarly been ascribed to Jews who have long been depicted
as greedy, money-obsessed, urban, rootless, devious and
culture-deprived. Plus, Jews were already considered to rule America and
to be responsible for the vulgarity of American culture and the
ruthlessness of its policies. If there were such a thing as a Jewish
state in the 19th century, for many Europeans this was the United
States. This impression persisted in Germany as well as France
throughout the 1920s when President Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, was
portrayed as an agent of Jewish capital. And the widely used term Jew
York hardly needs much explanation. Ditto the commonplace in much
European right-wing discourse of Franklin Delano Roosevelt being a Jew
by dint of his name’s similarity to Rosenfeld. The Norwegian writer Knut
Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920, firmly
believed that the linkage of Jews and America constituted the prime evil
of the modern world.

After the Holocaust, the overt articulation of anti-Semitism became
unacceptable in Western societies, thus marginalizing the ideological
amalgam of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as a marker of the equally
unacceptable far right. But the Six-Day War of 1967 changed everything.
Jews were no longer perceived as victims of the Holocaust but as
victimizers of the Palestinians.

In an otherwise immensely commendable, because profoundly democratizing,
growth of the discourse of compassion for the disempowered that came to
dominate liberal culture in the West, especially since the late 1960s,
Israel’s and America’s power became the two main enemies of world peace.
Worse, they mutated into fascist states not only for the radical left
but also for the bourgeois antiwar movements throughout Europe.
Denouncing Israel and America became bon ton around Europe’s
left-liberal dinner tables. In a 2007 review of Markovits’ Uncouth
Nation titled “Love to Hate You,”
Mary Fitzgerald commences her piece with a lengthy quote of the
well-known British writer Margaret Drabble: “‘My anti-Americanism has
become almost uncontrollable,’ wrote Margaret Drabble in May 2003, two
months after the invasion of Iraq. ‘It has possessed me like a disease.
It rises in my throat like acid reflux. … I can’t keep it down any
longer. I detest Disneyfication. I detest Coca-Cola. I detest burgers. I
detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about
history.’” Fitzgerald continues: “Europeans (I use the term loosely) see
themselves as vastly different from Americans, yet in some parts of the
world we are indistinguishable. It seems perverse, then, that
anti-Americanism is the only face of xenophobia still broadly accepted
in Europe. If, at a dinner party, you imitated the way Chinese people
speak, laughed about their stupidity, their ‘slitty eyes’ and their lack
of grace, you could safely expect never to be invited back. But no one
thinks twice about calling Americans dumb, fat and uncultured. How is it
acceptable for one superpower, but not the other, to be the object of
such derision?”

Of course it is acceptable because in China’s case, we are dealing with a
nonwhite, in many ways still-developing country that suffered at times
from Western colonialism; whereas in the American case, we have the
absolute core of all evils: Western, white, developed, (neo) colonial.
Add to this collection of negatives the fact that in contrast to its
West European counterparts (the dowagers Britain, Germany, France,
Italy, Spain who at least have the cultural panache and historical
legitimacy that somehow mitigate their colonial crimes) America is
perceived as a cultural parvenu, a crude newcomer, an unoriginal
usurper, an uncouth imitator. How often have both of us heard in our
daily conversations in the German-speaking world, uttered even by
admirers of the United States with no traces of any anti-American
feelings or attitudes, that America, fine place that it might be, was
simply not a Kulturnation or Kulturvolk and could never
attain such august status no matter how hard it tried, though perhaps
eminent in matters relating to technology. Simply put, America could
never attain any authenticity worthy of the name. Never having had any
nobility it could never attain being noble in the arts, tastes, manners,
always relegated to being commercial at best. “American culture” was an
oxymoron.

To be so reviled by left-liberal intellectuals, one needs to be both
politically and militarily powerful, but judged to be culturally
inferior, all of which the United States fulfils perfectly. Ditto with
Israel. By constructing the former as an all-powerful white colonizer,
it thus has become an acceptable object of derision and hatred at
left-liberal dinner parties. Not so for Jews—yet—who, by dint of the
Holocaust are still perceived as victims. Yet this “Holocaust pass” has
begun to fade as David Hirsh’s book Contemporary Left Antisemitism
so emphatically demonstrates. The fashionable anti-Zionist discourse
that has become de rigueur among trade unions, churches, left-liberal
parties, and social gatherings has entered a slippery slope towards
anti-Semitism which, of course, all its practitioners deny with
vehemence by accusing those holding this view as acting in open bad
faith, driven by their maniacal desire to cover up the magnitude of
Israel’s crimes, which must be enormous to merit such opprobrium.

Today the old 19th- and early-20th-century notion of Jewish power
pulling strings stealthily in America’s politics (Washington), its
economy and business (Wall Street) and its culture (Hollywood and the
East Coast intelligentsia) is widely shared well beyond extremes of the
left and the right. Add to this the postwar “Israel lobby,” and the
inextricable linkage between Israel/Jews and America becomes an
inevitable one.

Let us briefly look at some relevant data on this phenomenon by
mentioning some polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, which asks
its respondents on a regular basis whether they have favorable or
unfavorable views of the United States and of Jews. Although these items
do not comprise optimal measurements of anti-Semitism and
anti-Americanism since they do not cover the whole spectrum of relevant
resentments, they allow us to see rough estimates as to how closely
anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are intertwined. In 2016, for
example, the polls show that 53 percent of the French respondents who
had unfavorable views of Jews also had unfavorable views of the United
States. Negative attitudes toward the United States were also found
among 57 percent of the Germans who had reported unfavorable views of
Jews. The respective number for Greece was 68 percent, for Hungary 40
percent, for Italy 34 percent, for the Netherlands 50 percent, for
Poland 33 percent, for Spain 49 percent, for Sweden 51 percent, and for
Britain 41 percent. These numbers are even higher for countries like
Egypt (80 percent), Jordan (88 percent), Turkey (91 percent) Pakistan
(87 percent) or the Palestinian territories (82 percent) as a poll
conducted in 2011 shows. Since these are also countries in which Jews
are generally disliked (unfavorable ratings for Jews in these countries
reach over 95 percent) the prevalence of an anti-Semitic
anti-Americanism (or anti-American anti-Semitism) seems the rule rather
than the exception there.

In a study Beyer conducted together with Ulf Liebe he found that the
strong correlation between anti-Semitic and anti-American resentments
apparent in their German sample emanated from “functional similarities”
of the two objects of resentment: Both fulfill the function to
“rationalize social change.” Concretely, respondents feeling “uncertain”
about what the future will bring and resentful of the world “changing
too fast” as well as having generally negative views of “globalization”
reported higher anti-Semitic and anti-American attitudes than did the
rest of the sample. In yet another large-scale comparative study, Beyer
looked at the contemporary presence of anti-Semitism in 18 countries
(Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon,
Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the
United Kingdom, and the United States). While widely varied in its
respective country-specific manifestations, texture and intensities,
Beyer found that bringing to bear three of his many “independent
variables”—anti-Americanism, anti-globalization, and nationalism—the
impact of the anti-Americanism variable on anti-Semitism in each of
these countries was much higher and statistically significant than that
of anti-globalization and nationalism. Concretely: Anti-Semitic
attitudes were compellingly linked to anti-American ones.

In contrast to poll results, graffiti certainly do not allow us to draw
deep conclusions about the political zeitgeist and its ideological
peculiarities. Nonetheless, graffiti represent traces of public opinion
and mark a consciousness which might often still be unacceptable being
verbalized in public or to a researcher asking questions for a survey.
In a way, graffiti serve the same function as the anonymity of the
internet. They provide an unfiltered medium to voice what one harbors in
one’s heart and not what proper society expects one to say. The
presence of a graffito during the Iraq war in April 2004 at a Hamburg
subway station read Kerry ist auch Jude! (Kerry, too, is Jewish)
written over a Star of David in the middle of which the letters USA
appeared, omitted the anti-Israelism accompanying the anti-Americanism
of the graffito in Leipzig mentioned at the outset of our presentation.
(Kerry, of course, refers to John Kerry, the former secretary of state,
at the time U.S. senator from Massachusetts and a contestant for
becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate for the election to the
presidency of the United States later that fall.) The oft-invoked cover
of legitimate anti-Zionism for actual anti-Semitism was no longer needed
in this case. It was not for the first time that an American politician
had conveniently mutated into a Jew.

The myth that Jews, helped by their American masters or servants, rule
the world never disappeared. It merely lay dormant for a few decades in
the aftermath of the Holocaust, thus deviating from the norm of having
anti-Semitism be an integral and accepted part of public discourse.
Alas, there are many signs that the threshold of shame concerning
anti-Semitism has been substantially lowered. And its consistent link to
anti-Americanism makes this lowering so much easier and more socially
acceptable. Anti-Semitism’s association with America and thus to
ultimate power, makes invoking it an antinomian act of speaking truth to
power, which, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, is
inherently a good thing.

Sunday, November 06, 2016

"The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign" (Matthew Yglesias)

If we wind up electing a dangerous and manifestly unfit authoritarian xenophobic demagogue—who also happens to be a shameless pathological liar with a flamboyantly corrupt and sleazy record as an entrepreneur and entertainment figure—to be President of the United States, one factor contributing to that outcome will be the impact of an endlessly ramifying pseudo-scandal concerning Hillary Clinton's use of a non-governmental e-mail server while she was Secretary of State. As Matt Yglesias and others have noted, "In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined."

Although most people have only a vague grasp of what this whole business is supposed to be about, many of them—including otherwise informed and intelligent people who lean both to the right and to the left—have the impression that this is somehow a Very Big Deal. That is, they think that Clinton didn't just make a politically unfortunate but substantively not very important error of judgment, acting in ways that weren't very different from practices by other public officials in other administrations, but committed an exceptionally serious or even criminal offense.

But people who feel that way are wrong. They've been conned. In reality, "Emailgate" is a fundamentally bogus pseudo-scandal that has gotten blown grotesquely out of proportion, cynically and effectively, by a combination of Republican Congressional witch-hunters and the larger right-wing propaganda machinery, abetted by a remarkably gullible and easily manipulated mainstream media.

=> Since this pseudo-scandal has so thoroughly distorted and poisoned the 2016 presidential election campaign, and since the right-wing attack machine will certainly keep pushing it after November 8 if Clinton is elected president (along with other phony Clinton "scandals"), it is important to understand that this is, indeed, a bogus and over-hyped pseudo-scandal. If you're not sure whether "emailgate, like so many Clinton
pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit", and even if you are, I strongly recommend reading this usefully clarifying—and justifiably irate—analysis by Matthew Yglesias. Titles and headlines are sometimes misleading, but this one is very much on-target:

[E]mail-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the
election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an
overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans
believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it
does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates,
and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the
details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of
judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton
pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way
a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US
presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance,
giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the
two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the
election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way. [....]

The following point is so bizarre, and so telling, that Yglesias reiterates it at the beginning of his concluding section:

Network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Cable news has been, if anything, worse, and many prestige outlets have joined the pileup. One malign result of obsessive email coverage is that the public is left totally unaware of the policy stakes in the election. Another is that the constant vague recitations of the phrase ‘‘Clinton email scandal’’ have firmly implanted the notion that there is something scandalous about anything involving Hillary Clinton and email, including her campaign manager getting hacked or the revelation that one of her aides sometimes checked mail on her husband’s computer.

But none of this is true. Clinton broke no laws according to the FBI itself. Her setup gave her no power to evade federal transparency laws beyond what anyone who has a personal email account of any kind has. Her stated explanation for her conduct is entirely believable, fits the facts perfectly, and is entirely plausible to anyone who doesn't simply start with the assumption that she's guilty of something.

Given [Colin] Powell’s conduct, Clinton wasn't even breaking with an informal precedent. The very worst you can say is that, faced with an annoying government IT policy, she used her stature to find a personal workaround rather than a systemic fix that would work for everyone. To spend so much time on such a trivial matter would be absurd in a city council race, much less a presidential election. To do so in circumstances when it advances the electoral prospects of a rival who has shattered all precedents in terms of lacking transparency or basic honesty is infinitely more scandalous than anything related to the server itself.

But read the whole thing. And if you read just one piece about "Emailgate", be sure to read this one.

Friday, November 04, 2016

Slavoj Žižek would vote for Trump

As we approach our extremely serious political moment of truth on November 8, here's a bit of comic relief (of the "grimly amusing" variety):

Some characteristically pseudo-sophisticated, pseudo-radical,
under-informed, and deeply irresponsible commentary on the US presidential election from the clever, sometimes stimulating, sometimes entertaining, occasionally even perceptive, but almost always wrong-headed philosophical/political provocateur and celebrity public intellectual Slavoj Žižek.

=> I think Alan Johnson's comment on this video clip in a Facebook post got it right:

I have been writing critical pieces about Zizek for about 6 years now. (He is an authoritarian communist, basically.) In response he called me "a jerk" in the New Statesman. I think it's pretty clear who the jerk is now. (By the way his nonsense is a reprise of the catastrophic decision of the German Stalinists in the 1930s to say "After Hitler, Us!" and so refuse to ally with the Social Democrats against the Nazis. Zizek says, in effect, "After Trump, Us!" My God, the state of our intellectual culture. (Oh, and leave your fucking nose alone!)

Monday, August 01, 2016

Obama sticks to his central vision (continued)

This is a follow-up to my post last Friday, "Obama sticks to his central vision". One of the responses I got came from my friend Bob Bell, who explored further some of the issues I touched on in the closing remarks of my post. I think the issues raised by Bob in his own remarks are important, and what he has to say about them is perceptive and usefully thought-provoking. So with his permission, I'm sharing his message below.

Here's the last paragraph of my Friday post:

OK, a full assessment would have to take into account some of the disappointments and shortcomings of Obama's actual presidency, and consider whether and to what extent they might have been linked to the ways that Obama tried to implement this orienting vision in practice. Among other things, it's clear that for a while Obama had unrealistic hopes about the prospects for working out constructive compromises with the Congressional Republicans. He underestimated the extent to which they would respond to his presidency with a strategy of unrelenting, indiscriminate, monolithic obstructionism and intensified partisan polarization, and did not foresee the political effectiveness of that strategy in terms of partisan advantage for the Republicans, damage to the country notwithstanding. (That strategy also, by the way, had the unintended side-effect of helping deliver the Republican Party to Trump.) But one can't do everything at once. And those errors and setbacks do not, in my view, undermine the validity and value of Obama's central message.

Bob Bell's response follows. I've taken the liberty of bolding one set of points that I think are absolutely on-target and deserve special attention.

—Jeff Weintraub

---------------------------------------------------
This is a nice and timely message.

I would elaborate on your closing comment. A central problem in Obama’s politics, which will be even worse in another Clinton presidency, is the failure of the Democrats to mount a clear and sustained attack on the incivility of the Republican party. Obama, trying to build a working relationship with Republicans in Congress early in his first term, missed the opportunity to call out the obstructionism that undermined political compromise and frustrated majority rule.

Hillary, who is too flawed a character and too much the maneuvering tactical politician to articulate and stick to a civic vision that Americans can take seriously or even grasp, is running against Trump and his character, since she figures that will enable her to win. She needs to emphasize her opposition to the party that cultivates authoritarian and scorched earth politics and offers only the empty, hopeful, and failed free market fantasies of Paul Ryan and his friends. Only by running against that party, and not just its extraordinary candidate, will she be able to govern, which, surely, is the reason to run for office.

In a rational world, major themes of the Democratic primaries and convention would be (1) that the “brokenness” and “rigging” of the political system is a direct result of a Republican party that has largely abandoned the civil norms that enable American government to function and majorities to work their will and (2) that Democrats need to propose ways to make government work despite the influence of demagogues like Trump and uncivil, irresponsible ideologues like Cruz, who now dominate the opposition party. It is testament to the desperate state of our politics that Democrats have engaged in essentially no realistic discussion of how their party proposes to make government more functional—instead, we get candidates debating the relative merits of different plans (for college, for climate change, for inequality, etc.) and ignoring the reality that neither plan has any chance of being enacted into law.

One other disillusioned comment. Trump has succeeded via attacks on two cardinal and consensual ideas of the American elite—that free trade produces economic growth and prosperity and that a broad and humane version of U.S. international leadership will help both our country and the world at large. Our elites have been remarkably silent as these bipartisan notions have come under attack and have offered very little rationale for why they hold these views. Countries are in bad trouble when their elites stop understanding or believing in the system for which they are responsible and from which they benefit (the Soviet Union is a case in point). We are in bad trouble.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Obama sticks to his central vision

One of the things that Barack Obama delivered in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, which has to rank among his truly great speeches, was a powerful restatement of his central orienting vision of political community and democratic citizenship, which he first presented during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007-2008. After all the trials and tribulations of his presidency, it's clear that he still remains committed to that vision, like it or not. In fact, anyone who follows Obama's speech closely and compares it with some key speeches he gave in 2008 will notice that he went out of his way to emphasize some of the continuities.

As I listened to Obama's speech, I was reminded of a piece that my friend Andy Markovits and I wrote way back in 2008 titled "Obama and the Progressives: A Curious Paradox". I think the points we were making there remain timely and relevant—especially in the context of an election contest against the threat posed by Trump and Trumpism. So I offer some highlights as food for thought. (Anyone who's interested can find the rest here.)

--------------------------------------------------
[....] People often talk about Obama's soaring rhetoric, but what's the content of that rhetoric? To put it in terms that the Founders would have understood immediately, Obama has made civic patriotism and republican virtue central to the message of his whole campaign. He has consistently championed a politics of solidarity, active citizenship, national community, and the common good. Like Lincoln, Obama portrays the United States as a nation defined by certain constitutive ideals and charged with the project of imperfectly but continually striving to achieve, extend, and enrich these ideals in concrete ways ("in order to form a more perfect union"). Furthermore, Obama affirms and celebrates "the promise of America" (adding that "I know the promise of America because I have lived it"), while insisting that to fulfill that promise requires constant effort, civic engagement, shared sacrifices, and conflict as well as
cooperation.

The most crucial requirement ("the great need of the hour," in a formulation borrowed from Martin Luther King) is active moral and
political solidarity -- not only to empower oppressed and underprivileged groups, but to bind together and revitalize a more
comprehensive national community.

(Obama is popular around the world, but it's no accident that he drives some hard-core anti-Americans up the wall. For example, the Australian/British journalist John Pilger dismissed Obama as "a glossy Uncle Tom" who believes, along with Clinton and McCain, that "the US is not subject to the rules of human
behaviour, because it is 'a city upon a hill'"--whereas in reality it is just "a monstrous bully.") [Update: In 2016, Pilger prefers Trump to Clinton or Sanders.]

Historically, those themes have often been prominent in American politics, including progressive, reformist,
and radical politics. (Let's not forget that the Pledge of Allegiance, which Obama has pointedly quoted, was originally written by a Christian socialist.) But in recent decades they have become increasingly unfashionable in some quarters--including those that have produced many of Obama's most passionate supporters.

Nowadays many (not all) self-styled progressives distrust any patriotic talk and regard appeals to solidarity and the common good as mystifying bunk or dangerous propaganda. Instead, serious discussion of politics is supposed to focus exclusively on competing interests, and much allegedly progressive discourse has gone beyond valuing diversity to supporting an irreducibly
fragmented "identity politics" based on fetishizing "difference." (The main alternatives to balkanizing ultra-"multiculturalism"--more accurately termed "plural monoculturalism," as Amartya Sen points out--are often varieties of abstract legalism or cosmopolitanism equally allergic to the notion of national community.) From this perspective, Obama's invocations of "the American people's desire to no longer be defined by our differences," and his expressed conviction that "this nation is more than the sum of its parts--that out of many, we are truly one," should sound heretical. Ditto for his insistence that we have and must pursue "common hopes" that reach across our differences, aiming for more inclusive solidarity and effective recognition of the "larger responsibility we have to one another as Americans."

Put bluntly, the core of Obama's message would appear to be completely incompatible with the proclaimed beliefs of many of his most ardent progressive supporters. (And we haven't even mentioned the religious imagery of compassion, covenant, and redemption--analyzed thoughtfully and provocatively by Philip Gorski--with which Obama sometimes links his political message.) So what gives?

Three partial explanations, not mutually exclusive, strike us as plausible. First, the fact that Obama is African-American probably helps to make his appeals to American civic patriotism (along with his religious imagery) more acceptable in progressive circles than they would be coming from a white candidate. Second, some of Obama's supporters--and critics--probably assume that all this stuff is just empty campaign rhetoric that Obama doesn't really believe himself. We suspect they're wrong about that.

But the most interesting fact is that many of Obama's progressive supporters don't simply accept or tolerate his message. They are moved, thrilled, and inspired by it. As Gorski perceptively noted, this response suggests that Obama's message speaks
to profound hopes, concerns, and emotions that--for good or ill--run deeper than explicit beliefs and positions. We hope so. For decades progressive politics in America has too often crippled itself by unilaterally surrendering the discourse of national community and the common good--and, with it, some of the key animating principles of active democratic citizenship. (Todd Gitlin and others have rightly decried this folly.) If Obama can help make these notions respectable again for self-styled progressives, that alone would be a valuable contribution.
--------------------------------------------------

=> OK, a full assessment would have to take into account some of the disappointments and shortcomings of Obama's actual presidency, and consider whether and to what extent they might have been linked to the ways that Obama tried to implement this orienting vision in practice. Among other things, it's clear that for a while Obama had unrealistic hopes about the prospects for working out constructive compromises with the Congressional Republicans. He underestimated the extent to which they would respond to his presidency with a strategy of unrelenting, indiscriminate, monolithic obstructionism and intensified partisan polarization, and did not foresee the political effectiveness of that strategy in terms of gaining partisan advantage for the Republicans, damage to the country notwithstanding. (That strategy also, by the way, had the unintended side-effect of helping deliver the Republican Party to Trump.) But one can't do everything at once. And those errors and setbacks do not, in my view, undermine the validity and value of Obama's central message.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Vote for the wolf ... to send them a message

This cartoon, which seems to be doing the rounds in Europe, brilliantly captures one element in the current political mood on both sides of the Atlantic. (Thanks to Suzanne Berger for the tip.)

It's clear that this was originally a Greek cartoon, since the Greek writing at the bottom of the campaign poster identifies the wolf with the swastika armband as a candidate for the Greek neo-fascist Golden Dawn party. Then someone translated the caption into French, possibly adapting it in the process.

For readers whose French is even weaker than mine ... what the sheep in the cartoon is saying can be roughly (though not literally) translated into English as: "I think I'll vote for the wolf. That will send the shepherd a message!" (borrowing a formulation from George Wallace). Protest voting, in other words.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Did Antonin Scalia just die in Texas?

If the reports of Scalia's death are correct, which they seem to be, this is a Very Big Deal. [Update: Those reports have been confirmed.]

There is absolutely no chance that the Republican-controlled Senate would confirm anyone that President Obama nominated to replace Scalia. (Mitch McConnell has already confirmed this.) So this will almost certainly mean a vacant seat on the Supreme Court between now and the inauguration of the next President ... which will, among other things, help to underline the exceptionally high stakes involved in the 2016 election.

In the meantime, Scalia's absence means that, all of a sudden, there is
no longer a 5-4 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. That is likely to
affect the outcome of some extremely important upcoming cases. At the
very least, it will probably interrupt the Robert Court's escalating
campaign of right-wing judicial activism. It may also produce extended gridlock on certain key issues.

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead in a luxury resort in West Texas on Saturday morning, according to multiple reports. The San Antonio Express-Newssays Scalia was found dead “of apparent natural causes” while at the Cibolo Creek Ranch. Someone apparently went looking for Scalia Saturday morning after the 79-year-old Supreme Court justice failed to show up for breakfast and found him dead in his room. There was no immediate
evidence of foul play, according to a federal official cited anonymously by the Express-News.

Local ABC affiliate KVIA is also reporting the news, claiming it received confirmation that Scalia “died in his sleep … after a day of quail hunting.”

Ted Cruz appears to be the first Republican presidential hopeful to come out with a statement mourning Scalia. “A champion of our liberties and a stalwart defender of the Constitution, he will go down as one of the few Justices who single-handedly changed the course of legal history,” Cruz said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement shortly after the news broke, calling Scalia "a man of God, a patriot, and an unwavering defender of the written Constitution and the Rule of Law."

[....]

Scalia had been on the Supreme Court since 1986, when he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan.

*This post has been updated since it was first published.

Daniel Politi has been contributing to Slate since 2004 and wrote the "Today's Papers" column from 2006 to 2009. You can follow him on Twitter @dpoliti.

Sunday, November 01, 2015

Pope Francis says that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism

The irrepressibly outspoken Pope Francis, who has repeatedly shown
that he's not afraid to make unexpected and controversial statements
about difficult subjects, has done it again:

Jewish leaders met with Pope Francis in Rome on the
50th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate, the declaration promulgated by
Pope Paul VI that led to improved relations between Jews and Catholics.

“Yes
to the rediscovery of the Jewish roots of Christianity. No to
anti-Semitism,” the pope said Wednesday morning during the public
audience on St. Peter’s Square. [....]

The Jewish
leaders were part of a delegation of representatives of the World Jewish
Congress in Rome for a meeting of its governing board. The meeting
focused on the situation of Jews around the world, as well as the
current tensions in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and
the Iranian threat.

“To attack Jews is anti-Semitism,
but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism.
There may be political disagreements between governments and on
political issues, but the State of Israel has every right to exist in
safety and prosperity,” Pope Francis told Lauder and his delegation.
[....]

In case anyone wonders whether the Pope's
Jewish interlocutors made up or exaggerated that last quotation, it has
also been been reported in Catholic publications like the UK Catholic Herald:

Pope Francis told Jewish leaders an outright attack on the State of Israel is just as ‘anti-semitic’ as attacks against Jews.

The
Pope made clear that attacks on the State of Israel are a form of
anti-Semitism in a private audience with World Jewish Congress president
Ronald S. Lauder and delegates.

“To attack Jews is
anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also
anti-Semitism,” Pope Francis told Lauder and his delegation. “There may
be political disagreements between governments and on political issues,
but the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and
prosperity.”[....]

If I were in Pope Francis's place,
I might have formulated that a little differently. As some of you
reading this may be aware, I have argued for a while that, strictly
speaking, anti-semitism and anti-Zionism should be analytically
distinguished. That's not because anti-Zionism is OK, but because the
relationship between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism is actually complex.
One of the peculiar features of our era is that, over the past
half-century or so, anti-Zionism (by which I mean systematic bias and
hostility against Israel, Israelis,
and supporters of Israel, shading off into obsessive hatred and
demonization that is often accompanied by conspiracy theories about real
or imaginary "Zionists") has emerged as an important and complex
ideological formation in its own right, with some of its own distinctive
roots and motivations, that is not always a direct product or
expression of anti-semitism. (Though sometimes it is, of course.)
Indeed, it sometimes happens that anti-Zionism helps promote
anti-semitism almost as much as the other way around. (For some further
elaboration, see here.)

But it's certainly true that the two are very often intertwined or indistinguishable
in practice ... and, anyway, anti-Zionist bias and bigotry is morally
reprehensible and dangerously pernicious in its own right, whether or
not it stems from (or is a coded expression of) anti-semitism. And the
claim that Israel has no legitimate right to exist is, of course, a
paradigm expression of anti-Zionism. So I think the Holy Father is
fundamentally on the right track here, and his statement is welcome and
important.

=> At first I wondered whether the
Vatican bureaucracy would try to walk back, tone down, or explain away
this statement by Pope Francis. Some of them must be quite unhappy and
alarmed about it—along with many Catholic clergy & other leaders
of Catholic minorities in the Muslim world, who have worried for
several decades that papal condemnations of anti-semitism, let alone of anti-Zionism, put their communities at risk.

But so far the Church has not, in fact, repudiated the Pope's straightforward condemnation of anti-Zionism. Walter Russel Mead correctly emphasizes why this stance is significant and deserves attention:

[....] A Vatican spokesman confirmed the gist of the Pope’s remarks to CNN. His Holiness had previously told a journalist in June that, “Whoever does not recognize the Jewish People and the State of Israel falls in anti-Semitism.”

It is this stance, and not the Vatican’s controversial recognition
of Palestine this summer, that is the break from the historical norm.
The Pope was speaking on the 50th anniversary—a blink of an eye in the
history of the church—of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document
that repositioned the Catholic relationship with Judaism from one of
antagonism to respect for the “people to whom God spoke first.” And for
much of Israel’s history, Vatican-Israeli relations were poor: the Holy
See did not recognize Israel diplomatically until 1993.

So
while Pope Francis is often painted as pro-Palestinian, he’s actually
very pro-Israel by historic standards. But now, in a time of increased
anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Europe, Pope Francis’ comments are a
welcome ray of light.

On
Wednesday, Pope Francis met with Jewish leaders to mark the 50th
anniversary of Nostra Aetate, a crucial Vatican II declaration that
revolutionized Jewish-Catholic relations by absolving Jews of collective
responsibility for Christ’s death and denouncing anti-Semitism. At the
gathering, Francis decided to continue in the spirit of that document by
condemning what he described as a modern form of anti-Semitism: the
denial of the Jewish state’s right to exist.

“To attack
Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is
also anti-Semitism,” the Pope told a World Jewish Congress delegation.
“There may be political disagreements between governments and on
political issues, but the State of Israel has every right to exist in
safety and prosperity.”

Francis’s statement is
noteworthy because the pontiff is far from an unconditional backer of
Israel. He has criticized both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and been willing to make powerful symbolic gestures in support of the Palestinian cause. Indeed, as veteran Vatican reporter John Allen has noted, this Church stance predates
the current pope. But with his words on Wednesday, Francis drew a
bright red line between critiquing Israeli policies and critiquing
Israel’s existence. The former, he said, is legitimate and sometimes
necessary; the latter is bigotry.

With this
declaration, Francis joined an illustrious group of global leaders who
have asserted the same in recent months. In May, President Obama toldThe Atlantic‘s
Jeffrey Goldberg that denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish
homeland represented a failure to learn the lessons of history, and
ultimately an expression of anti-Semitism. Prior to that, British Prime
Minister David Cameron and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls had similarly stated that anti-Zionism—as opposed to criticism of Israel’s policies—constituted anti-Semitism.

Notably, the vast majority of the leadership of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel opposes the Jewish state’s right to exist. As BDS leader Omar Barghouti famously put it, Israel “was Palestine, and there is no reason why it should not be
renamed Palestine.” Ahmed Moor, another BDS leading light and editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine, has been even more blunt:
“BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” Likewise, California State
University professor >As’ad Abu Khalil has similarly stated,
“Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the
existence of the State of Israel.” The Pope was doubtless aware of this
activism, which is particularly prevalent in Europe, and acted to
address it unambiguously.

At a time, then, when college campuses are debating whether BDS
constitutes constructive discourse on Israel, and local Hillel Houses
are considering which sorts of critics of the Jewish state to lend a
platform to, Francis’s and Obama’s guidance could not be more timely.

Thursday, July 09, 2015

A last-minute deal to resolve the EU-Greek crisis?

It looks as though there will be a last-minute political deal, which Tsipras will now have to push through the Greek parliament. (I suspect that may require votes from non-Syriza parties to make up for defections from the governing coalition.) What this deal actually means will depend on the details ... which I presume will become clearer soon.

The Greek government capitulated on Thursday to demands from its creditors for severe austerity measures in return for a modest debt write-off, raising hopes that a rescue deal could be signed at an emergency meeting of EU leaders on Sunday.

Athens is understood to have put forward a package of reforms and public spending cuts worth €13bn (£9.3bn) to secure a third bailout from creditors that could raise $50bn and allow it to stay inside the currency union.

A cabinet meeting signed off the reform package after ministers agreed that the dire state of the economy and the debilitating closure of the country’s banks meant it had no option but to agree to almost all the creditors terms.

Parliament is expected to endorse the package after a frantic few days of negotiation that followed a landmark referendum last Sunday in which Greek voters backed the radical leftist Syriza government’s call for debt relief.

Syriza, which is in coalition with the rightwing populist Independent party, is expected to meet huge opposition from within its own ranks and from trade unions and youth groups that viewed the referendum as a vote against any austerity.

Lafazanis represents around 70 Syriza MPs who have previously taken a hard line against further austerity measures and could yet wreck any top-level agreement.

Emphasising the likelihood of further strife in Greece next week even should a deal be concluded, Brussels officials talked privately of plans to fly in humanitarian aid such as food parcels and medicines to major cities.

The urgency of Greek efforts to prevent an exit from the euro came after Brussels set a midnight Thursday deadline for Greece to produce a package of measures in line with previous demands.

With the support of officials from the French finance ministry, Greek negotiators are believed to have accepted the need for VAT rises and rules blocking early retirement as the price of a deal.

Several EU leaders said the troika of creditors – the European commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank - must also make concessions to secure Greece’s future inside the eurozone.

Donald Tusk, who chairs the EU summits, said European officials would make an effort to address Greece’s key request for a debt write-off.

“The realistic proposal from Greece will have to be matched by an equally realistic proposal on debt sustainability from the creditors. Only then will we have a win-win situation,” Tusk said.

Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, aligned himself with France and Italy in seeking a way through the political maze that has defeated all previous efforts to find a breakthrough.

Sources close to Greece’s chief negotiator and finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, said he had finalised and submitted a plan of reforms for a third bailout to give creditors time to review it ahead of a summit of EU members on Sunday.

On Thursday, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble said the possibility of some kind of debt relief would be discussed over coming days, although he cautioned it may not provide much help.

“The room for manoeuvre through debt reprofiling or restructuring is very small,” he said.

Greece has long argued its debt is too high to be paid back and that the country requires some form of debt relief. The IMF agrees, but key European states such as Germany have resisted the idea.

Making Greece’s debt more sustainable would likely involve lowering the interest rates and extending the repayment dates on its bailout loans. Germany and many other European countries rule out an outright debt cut, arguing it would be illegal under European treaties.

The developments on Thursday boosted market confidence that a compromise will be found. The Stoxx 50 index of top European shares was up 2.4% in late afternoon trading.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met with finance ministry officials ahead of the cabinet meeting on Thursday afternoon which finalised his country’s plan, a day after his government requested a new three-year aid programme from Europe’s bailout fund and promised to immediately enact reforms.

The last-minute negotiations come as Greece’s financial system teeters on the brink of collapse. It has imposed restrictions on banking transactions since 29 June, limiting cash withdrawals to €60 per day to staunch a bank run. Banks and the stock market have been shut for just as long.

The closures, which have been extended until Monday, have led to daily lines at cash machines and have hammered businesses. Payments abroad have been banned without special permission.

Greece’s financial institutions have been kept afloat so far by emergency liquidity assistance from the ECB. But the central bank has not increased the amount in days, giving the lenders a stranglehold despite capital controls.

German ECB governing council member Jens Weidmann argued Greek banks should not get more emergency credit from the central bank unless a bailout deal is struck.
He said it was up to eurozone governments and Greek leaders themselves to rescue Greece.

The central bank “has no mandate to safeguard the solvency of banks and governments,” he said in a speech.

The ECB capped emergency credit to Greek banks amid doubt over whether the country will win further rescue loans from other countries. The banks closed and limited cash withdrawals because they had no other way to replace deposits.

Weidmann said he welcomed the fact that central bank credit “is no longer being used to finance capital flight caused by the Greek government”.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)